Channel Islands National Park

The northern Channel Islands are among the oldest known homelands in North America. The Chumash people lived here for at least ten thousand years, and human remains found on Santa Rosa Island are among the oldest on the continent. The islands were not a remote outpost but a thriving center of Chumash life, with permanent villages and a maritime culture built around the sea.

The Chumash crossed the channel in the tomol, a sewn-plank canoe unlike almost anything else in Native North America, and they made shell-bead money that circulated far up and down the coast. Island villages like Swaxil on Santa Cruz supported large populations from the ocean's bounty.

In the mission era the island Chumash were removed to the mainland missions, and the islands passed through generations of ranching. The Chumash remain a living people on the mainland today, and their descendants continue to renew the tomol tradition with ceremonial crossings back to the islands, so the park tells this as an ongoing story, not a closed one.

The islands' long isolation turned them into an evolutionary laboratory. The island fox, a miniature relative of the mainland gray fox that shrank to the size of a house cat, is the emblem of the park, and it very nearly vanished: predation and disease crashed the population to a handful of animals before an emergency captive-breeding and recovery effort brought it back, one of the fastest mammal recoveries ever recorded.

The island scrub jay, larger and bluer than its mainland cousin, lives only on Santa Cruz Island and nowhere else on earth. Add endemic plants, birds, and other creatures and the tally of species unique to these islands climbs into the dozens, which is why biologists treat the park as a rare, intact natural experiment worth guarding closely.

The waters around the islands hold some of the healthiest giant kelp forests on the Pacific coast, underwater groves that sway forty feet tall and shelter garibaldi, sea lions, and countless fish. Cold, nutrient-rich upwelling feeds all of it, and the park protects the sea as well as the land.

Above the surface, the coastlines are cut with sea caves and arches. Santa Cruz Island's Painted Cave is one of the largest sea caves in the world, and kayaking the island's cliffs and grottoes, when the swell allows, is one of the great adventures in California. Snorkelers and divers come for the kelp, and whale watchers cross the channel to see blue and humpback whales feeding in season.

Each island offers something different. Anacapa is the closest and easiest, a spine of cliffs with a lighthouse and a famous arch. Santa Cruz, the largest, has the most trails, coves, and kayaking. Santa Rosa and San Miguel are wilder and more weather-beaten, and tiny Santa Barbara is a lonely grassland far to the south.

There are no services anywhere, so day trips and camping alike require you to bring everything and carry it out again. The crossing can be rough and boats can be delayed by weather, but that difficulty is exactly what has kept these islands empty and wild while the mainland filled up.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.